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What did I do yesterday? When did I leave for lunch? How long did It take me to finish my last ticket?

Maybe you have one of those jobs where time tracking is a necessity, and if so, you can probably relate to the questions above.

But, time tracking is, oddly enough, time consuming. Even the best systems require you to minutely write down the start and end of every step of every project. This is not only inefficient, it is also hugely error prone.

In short, the whole process has the potential to be automated.

trackme (working title) is my attempt to optimize this problem, but this tool is not a time tracker, it is a file modification monitor.

The app keeps track of all your recently modified files, sorts and filters them and then displays a coherent list of start and end times for every session on your pc. All of your data is then saved into a local database.

I’m thrilled to share my latest side project with you. I call it aape. It is my version of an Adobe Animate PixiJS exporter.

Here are two demos of exported animations:

How it works:

The project is split into two parts. A JSFL script to export your current Animate timeline and a few JS classes to download and display the animation.

Your animation is build as usual. The only difference being that you have to explicitly tell aape which part of the animation should be exported as Bitmap. This is done by selecting the MovieClip in your Animate library and changing it to a Graphics object.
This workaround allows you to use every filter option of Animates AS3 documents.

MovieClip labels and comments are also exported and can be used by executing the familiar gotoAndStop / gotoAndPlay methods.

After building your scene you execute aape form the toolbar. The export starts with the currently open MovieClip as root element.

A simple export generates three files. A PNG Atlas + JSON file containing image locations and a JSON object that describes the exported timeline (the library).
The files can than be loaded and added to the aape.Timeline object. It’s prototype is the PIXI.DisplayObject. So you can easily add it to your existing display list.
The tool is not yet finished. I’m still working on the Animate user interface with export settings as well as a proper documentation.

After four years I finally decided to dust of the good old blog to write about my latest work. The last few years have been exciting.I ditched Flash (we had a good run) and tested the waters of the Objective-C world (which was fun, but short lived).
But the majority of my last years was spent on JavaScript and HTML5 games.
Game Dev has been the backbone of my work ever since. To cut a long story short, I eventually ended up learning Unity and C#.

But except for the occasional forum post and my usual ramblings on Twitter, I haven’t shared much of my work lately. Enter the Unity Asset Store.

What an amazing outlet for your one-off ideas, partial projects and clever scripts. I started my publisher profile, and uploaded my first projects in no time. And although there were a few gotchas on the way, publishing (and monetizing) my work was dead simple.
As of now I uploaded three different projects to the store.

Two Tone City, a set of pixel art buildings / trees and characters, with the restriction of only using two colors to draw them.

All of them have been a great way to learn more about C#, art and Unity. To keep keep me motivated, I decided to sell them for a few dollars (although that might change in the future).
But mostly I’m trying to improve my work. Engaging with a community is always fun, and I look forward to reading your feedback once again.

Last week my first iPhone app Pixel Painter has finally been approved by Apple and is now available on the App Store.

Pixel Painter is a bare bones drawing application that allows you to create pixel art on the go. It features a 1x1px pen tool, a color picker, an eraser tool, an image position tool and an image lock and zoom tool. Your finished image can than be saved as PNG. If you are into Pixel Art, this app might be for you.

Developing the app was a great learning experience and I’m very eager to share some common pitfalls in iOS development. The next few posts might focus on developing for the iOS platform and especially the transition from ActionScript to Objective-C.